Published: 17 May 2022
Last updated: 4 March 2024
Tareq Abu Hamad is the first Jerusalem Palestinian to reach a senior position in a ministry; he describes what it's like to function as a Palestinian within the Israeli system
WHEN TAREQ ABU HAMAD held the post of acting chief scientist of the State of Israel, he was scheduled to take part in a meeting at the Soreq Nuclear Research Centre, south of Tel Aviv.
“I got to the reactor and they said that we would actually meet outside instead of inside. It was obvious to me that it was only because I was there,” he says, but quickly makes it clear that “in the end I went in. I think I may be the first Arab to ever enter” the centre, whose work is related to civilian, not military, purposes.
For Dr Abu Hamad, it was a formative experience. He is the first Jerusalem Palestinian to reach a senior position in an Israeli government ministry, the first Palestinian to attend cabinet meetings without being an Israeli citizen, and last year he became the first Jerusalem Palestinian to head an Israeli academic institution.
The first time I met Abu Hamad was at his home in the heart of the village of Sur Baher, in East Jerusalem. Like all the Palestinian locales in East Jerusalem, Sur Baher, situated between Kibbutz Ramat Rachel and the Judean Desert, is a maze-like, steep-sloped area of dense construction, of roads with no sidewalks, and with no playgrounds or green areas at all. His home is located opposite the village’s oldest mosque, on a street that’s been newly paved but that still lacks a sidewalk.
The venue for our second meeting could not have been more different from Sur Baher – an office designed on ecological principles, with walls of mud and straw, at Kibbutz Ketura in the southern Arava desert.
Surrounding the office is a small experimental farm where research is carried out in the areas of renewable energy, water purification and the production of cooking gas from refuse.
In an adjacent vegetable patch, which is irrigated with purified waste water, stands one of the country’s most famous trees. Dubbed “Methuselah,” it’s the first date palm tree to be grown from a 2,000-year-old seed found in a 1960s archaeological dig. Five similar trees are growing in a nearby, separate plot.
